When comparing KDE Plasma vs GNOME, the Slant community recommends KDE Plasma for most people. In the question“What are the best End-User desktops for Desktop PC's?”KDE Plasma is ranked 4th while GNOME is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose KDE Plasma is:

Included file manager provides several icon, list and detail views to choose from along with features such as tabs, bookmarks, tagging, previews and metadata, network file access, bluetooth file transfers to/from devices and excellent removable storage integration while remaining fast and easy to use.

Pros

Pro

Has a file manager that provides a good balance between power and simplicity

Included file manager provides several icon, list and detail views to choose from along with features such as tabs, bookmarks, tagging, previews and metadata, network file access, bluetooth file transfers to/from devices and excellent removable storage integration while remaining fast and easy to use.

Pro

Looks beautiful

The design of the three built-in desktop themes; Air, Breeze, and Oxygen, are very beautiful to some.

Pro

Keyboard friendly

Nearly all actions can be driven with keyboard commands. Window management, including effects such as desktop overviews, can be triggered with a keyboard control (or mouse gesture) and some even support filtering results (such as windows shown) by typing. The KRunner tool (default keybinding: Alt+F2 or Alt+Space) provides searching local files, online sources, unit conversions, math and more all from a keyboard driven interface.

Pro

KDE is an evolution on the classic desktop model

KDE 4 is a great evolution on the classic Win95/Gnome/XFCE approach. It's moving in innovative directions while respecting the classic metaphors.

Pro

Comes with a suite of powerful applications

Plasma Desktop generally comes packaged with a full set of applications to get users started, including a file manager (Dolphin), advanced file manager and browser (Konqueror), image and document viewers (Gwenview, Okular), the Calligra office suite, CD and DVD authoring (K3b) and dozens more. The desktop can be installed and used without these applications, but they add significant value for many people.

Pro

Highly flexible

There are many customization options and possibilities to tweak the desktop, including widgets.

Pro

Integrated advanced search

Plasma Desktop comes with an integration search system that makes it easy to find local files, emails, contacts, events and more. The file manager supports tagging and rating files as well as full-content searching and the KRunner command window and the Milou desktop widget makes searching for files, emails, applications and other content by name, subject, category, tag, fulltext, etc. very simple. It does this with essentially no noticeable interference with day-to-day usage of the computer, thanks to the scheduling built into the backend system (Baloo).

Pro

Adheres to standards

Standards adherence allows for interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops, with similar Wayland support being worked on. Applications not written with Plasma in mind work very well in Plasma as a result. The development team has also been instrumental in standard creation and adoption such as NETWM, X11 clipboard, icon themes, mimetype handling, application menu standardization, system tray protocols and notifications and more.

Pro

Bunch of coherent applications

What make plasma so nice is the galaxy of apps, sharing same look and feel, configuration and behaviour.

The technology that Plasma Desktop is built on, simply called "Plasma", also provides interfaces for phones, tablets, netbooks, and media centers in addition to the desktop. These additional interfaces use the same underlying frameworks and therefore work well together and have a unified feel to them. They also support a common set of applications across them which adapt to the input methods and screen sizes.

Pro

Activities overview

Grid-style app menu.

Pro

Dynamic workspaces

Setting provides for effortless workspace management.

Cons

Con

Stability problems

Under certain conditions, most of KDE's components can be highly sensitive to race conditions, which leads to KDE applications frequently crashing, and, on rare occasion, kdeinit itself locking up.

Con

HiDPI support is spotty

The log in screen as well as some other components of the OS do not scale properly under HIDPI. Everything in the log in screen will be displayed too small, as well as some areas of the OS.

Con

Perceived clunkyness and slowness

Compared to other options, KDE is still perceived slow. Especially, the desktop takes a few seconds to login.

Mouse pointer can feel sluggish, or laggy, on older systems

Con

Standardized

The desktop layout is not as modifiable as some other options, and certain settings require additional software (such as Gnome Tweak Tool) to reasonably modify.

Ad

Alternative Products

Each month, over 1.7 million people use Slant to find the best products and share their knowledge. Pick the tags you’re passionate about to get a personalized feed and begin contributing your knowledge.